


thanks, five

by attheborder



Category: Oh Hello - Kroll & Mulaney
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Comedy, M/M, Oral Sex, POV Outsider, POV Second Person, Theater - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 09:23:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20739926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/pseuds/attheborder
Summary: “Oooh, look at me, I’m Ravi and I live in a polyamorous anarchist commune in a Bushwick warehouse and I believe all problems can be solved by sitting down and fuckingtalking about thembecause I’mnineteen,”George sneers, using that really racist Indian accent he puts on when he makes fun of you. (You don’t have an accent. You do live in a polyamorous anarchist commune in Bushwick, though, so he’s got you there.)





	thanks, five

**Author's Note:**

  * For [summerdayghost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerdayghost/gifts).

Your first hint that something is _ up _is the fact that they arrive separately to the theater. Usually the two of them come in the same yellow cab, heaving themselves out in the midst of some stupid discussion about cannolis or Shavuos or the 2nd Avenue Subway. 

But this afternoon, Gil ambles up to the stage door alone, shining with pungent sweat and panting with exertion.

“Did you… _ walk _here?” you ask, handing him his customary afternoon seltzer. He likes it half-flat after sitting out all morning on a windowsill, absorbing the Sixth Avenue traffic fumes. 

“Ravi, would you believe,” wheezes Gil, “that I almost got mowed down by a halal cart in Columbus Circle? I think they thought I was a panhandler trying to jack their special sauce.” 

He sips at the seltzer contemplatively, with a worried, far-away look in his eyes; you wait for a follow-up, some secondary anecdote about how he managed to grab a fistful of shawarma for snackies on the way or something, but it never comes. 

George gets in a good ten minutes later, barging in through the lobby doors. His heavily lined forehead is even more deeply crevassed than usual, and his jaw is set so tightly it seems like his whole head might snap in half. He’s _ fuming. _

He doesn’t even so much as look at you as you give him the walk-and-talk rundown from your clipboard about today’s Too Much Tuna guest, which is weird because usually George likes to take the time to interrupt you to ask about _ Shark Of The Heart, _the play you’re writing, so he can offer some more of his unsolicited “critiques.” (“You’re saying you’ve got a dame on stage for the whole first act and she never takes a tit out? Bah! You’ll never get anywhere with the downtown critics!”) 

Anyway, you think it’s strange, but decide it’s probably nothing. You don’t have time to deal with one of their petty squabbles right then, not when Jack the carpenter is freaking out about the broken hinge on the set’s apartment door and you have to go assure him that the entire front row for today’s show is a group ticket buy of aged retirees from a Jewish nursing home in Queens, and none of them will be able to even hear the dialogue, let alone the high-pitched squeaking of a door.

The thing about George and Gil is that, well, they’re George and Gil. They’ve been alive since the Jurassic period, and locked in most bizarre codependent friendship of all time since at least the Cretaceous. If you had any idea how their cocaine-addled brains actually worked, or were able to predict their moods with any kind of accuracy, you probably wouldn’t have had as many close encounters with the threat of real physical violence as you have these last few weeks.

You do know that if Dr. Briscoe, your playwriting professor at NYU, actually understood the shit that goes down at the Lyceum Theater, she’d be willing to enlist the help of the law school to winch you out of the arcane, satanic contract you unwittingly signed at the beginning of your internship.

And look, it’s not like you haven’t_ tried _ to tell her. But she’s _ so _ proud of having one of _ her _ students working on a real live Broadway show that she can’t _ possibly _ see the harm in some wacky old men just having some _ fun _with their cool, hip, young stage manager. (She’s an adjunct, obviously.) 

The plot thickens when you’re taking your usual shortcut to the tech office from the stage, after giving ten til house opens to the stagehands, when suddenly you round a corner in the stairwell and there’s Gil. He’s struggling into his show corduroys, which are different than his street corduroys by virtue of smelling slightly less like piss. Emphasis on _ slightly. _

“Hey, man,” you say. “You should be in your dressing room getting ready. What’s going on?” 

“George usually helps me with my pants,” he says, which says quite a lot but explains very little. “Cause of my arthritis.” 

“Okay… but why are you in the stairs?” 

“He’s _ mad _at me,” says Gil morosely. You can’t tell if his eyes are tearing up or if that’s just normal old-man wateriness, but regardless, it has a very off-putting effect. You feel like you’re looking into the haunted visage of a CGI-aged baby up on an IMAX screen. 

“Um,” you say. “What…. happened?” 

But Gil just shakes his head. He makes a motion with his shoulders that you’re pretty sure is an invitation to, uh, help him put his pants on, which you decline wordlessly with an expression you hope isn’t too pitying, because after all he _ is _technically your employer, but like, there’s a line. 

You feel weird just leaving him there in the stairwell, like a jump-scare in the most wrinkled haunted house of all time for the next hapless passerby to be scarred for life by, but you know you’re not going to figure this out by talking to the victim. 

So you head up to the dressing room, take a deep breath, and knock. From inside, there’s a bark: “Go away!” 

“Mr. St. Geegland, it’s me,” you say, and the door is flung open in your face. George is standing there, and he’s in his show costume, which is good, but behind him you can see chaos, script pages and dirty tupperware and aftershave bottles flung across the room, which is bad. 

“What do you want?” George snaps, and you open your mouth to respond, but he puts up a hand before you can speak. “I don’t wanna hear it,” he says. “Gil sent you here, didn’t he? Where is that cretin?”

You check your Casio watch. Shit, the house is open. “Do you want to... talk about it?” you ask, trying to hurry this along to some kind of resolution. 

“Oooh, look at me, I’m Ravi and I live in a polyamorous anarchist commune in a Bushwick warehouse and I believe all problems can be solved by sitting down and fucking _ talking about them _ because I’m _ nineteen,” _George sneers, using that really racist Indian accent he puts on when he makes fun of you. (You don’t have an accent. You do live in a polyamorous anarchist commune in Bushwick, though, so he’s got you there.) 

“Seriously, house is open and we’ve got an hour until curtain,” you say. “What is going on?” 

“He knows what he did!” snaps George. “And now he’s _ hiding _ from me, because he’s a pussy.” He narrows his eyes at you ferally, and his wrinkled hand is white-knuckled gripping the edge of the doorframe, like he’s just _ itching _ to form it into a fist and let it fly. “Are _ you _ a pussy, Ravi?” 

You’d think after two months of dealing with this psychopath your fear response would have adjusted to a new baseline, but unfortunately that’s not the case. Your heart starts to race and you stammer some defensive nonsense and get the hell out of there. 

You head down to hair & makeup, the domain of Melissa, whose impossible job it is to make Gil and George look even _ remotely _ like real alive human people before they have to stand on stage for a hundred minutes. You know your gig is tough, but man, does Melissa have it bad. 

“Hey, have either of them been in?” you ask urgently. Melissa looks up from the mirror, where you can see she’s been whiling away the time practicing an elaborate new eyeshadow look on herself, and she shakes her head with a grimace. 

You fling yourself down in the makeup chair next to hers, and start tapping your fingers nervously on your clipboard as you tell her about all the weird shit that’s been going down.

“What do I _ do? _ ” you moan. “It’s 30 minutes to curtain and I’m pretty sure I spotted Ezra Koenig with his _ parents _ in the lobby on the way here. _ Contra _ is my favorite album of all time! There _ needs _to be a show today!” 

She sighs. “Look, they’re professionals,” she says calmly. “Insane, maybe, but professionals. They did manage to get on Broadway, after all, that counts for something. Even if there’s some fight going on, they’ll put it aside for the sake of the show, and pick it right back up afterwards until it’s figured out.” 

You nod. This is a very sensible thing to say, and you very much want to believe her. So you head out, and spend the next half-hour doing your final checks and calls, really_ really _ trying to manifest the concept that Gil and George _ will _get their shit together, and hit their cue at curtain. 

You’re on your way up to the booth when there’s a tap on your shoulder. You turn around to see Lizzie, the props master, standing there wringing her hands. 

“Uh, Ravi...” she says nervously.

“...What is it?” you say, a slow build of dread growing in the pit of your stomach.

“Well,” she goes on, “I was on my way to do my pre-show pee, and I passed Gil going into the tech office, and then, um, post-pre-show-pee I came out, and I saw George coming down the hall, and he was like ‘where’s Gil,’ so I told him, but then I realized I probably shouldn’t have, because he said ‘oh, he’s gonna fucking _ get it,’ _and went in there, and I heard them shouting at each other, and then I came here to tell you—” 

She breaks off, looking at you nervously. 

You’re not _ dumb. _ You got into NYU. You got paid $100 per essay to ghostwrite the NYU applications of your younger sister’s white friends and most of _ them _got into NYU, too. So you rub together all of the brain cells you have left that haven’t been suffocated by A) the stress of this stupid internship, B) the polyamory infidelity drama currently inflaming your anarchist commune, C) the impending climate crisis that threatens the sustainability of human life on earth, and you realize: it’s gonna happen tonight. 

George St. Geegland is finally going to murder Gil Faizon in cold blood. 

With under ten minutes left to go until curtain, you hurtle away from Lizzie, back down the stairs towards the tech office. You don’t care if you have to call off the show, but you can’t let one poor perverted old man die at the hands of another, even if the former probably deserves it and it’ll make the latter happier than he’s been in decades to do it.

Skidding to a halt in the hallway, you press a nervous ear to the door and— oh, _ fuck, _ you hate being right, you can hear the most god-awful choking, sputtering sound coming from inside, Gil is being literally strangled to death as you just _ stand _there, like a coward, clutching your clipboard.

There’s always the chance this is a setup, and you’re about to walk right into a situation specifically designed to pin the murder on you. Honestly, you wouldn’t put it past George. He said he forgave you for that time you cued the giant Tuna Monster fly a few seconds too early and it came down right on his head, but you never quite believed him, and he absolutely is not above that kind of long-con revenge ploy. In fact, you happen to know he’s pulled them off before.

But the thing is that if Gil dies, you’ll have to call the police, and they’ll arrest George, and the show will get cancelled, and if the show gets cancelled you won’t get your course credit for the internship and god dammit, you are fucking _ getting that course credit. _

So you swing open the door, fully preparing to launch your severely underweight frame at George and wrestle him physically off of the helpless Gil, but what you see inside the tech office makes you regret every single decision you’ve made hat’s brought you to this moment, including but not limited to applying to NYU in the first place, because: 

There’s Gil, on his knees in the middle of the tech office, and he’s got George’s _dick_ _in his mouth oh good fucking god._

You haven’t gotten this much of an eyeful of elderly testicles since your ex-girlfriend Kiara dragged you to a figure drawing club meeting freshman year. Every nerve in your body is screaming for you to _ get out of there _before your psyche is fully dismantled by the sight of it, but at the same time it’s like one of those subway beggars with the necrotic flesh wounds— it’s absolutely gut-churning, you can’t look away, and it could only be happening in New York City on a weekday evening. 

“What?” says George, staring you dead in the eye. “Never witnessed a purely platonic apology cocksucking before? You’re obviously not getting your parents’ money’s worth out of that commune.” 

“Hi Ravi!” says Gil cheerily, except his mouth is still fully wrapped around George’s dick so it comes out like more of a muffled _ Hrhg, Rfhrh! _

“Shut up, you’re not done!” George gets a hand on the back of Gil’s head and just— _ shoves _it forward. You wince, but Gil practically purrs and does something slurpy with his tongue and George sucks in a wheezy breath, his eyes shuddering closed, before he snaps them open right back at you.

“You gonna keep watching?” George says. “That your thing, you Kama Sutra freak?” 

“Um. Uh,” you stammer, eyes uncontrollably darting from George’s accusatory glare and Gil’s dopey, contented expression. “Um— five until curtain.” 

“Thanks, five,” says Gil, like the life-long theater professional he is, but due to the continued application of mouth to dick it sounds like _ Thngr, ffrhg. _

You spin on your heel, not even bothering to close the door, and you fucking _ scram. _

The more you think about it, the more it makes sense. Of_ course _ there’s a psychosexual element to their insane dynamic. It would explain so much, if Gil has really been sucking George off since the late 60’s. Of course, just because it makes sense, doesn’t mean it’s not literally the most traumatizing thing you’ve ever been party to— and you’ve worked the bar at _ multiple _“performance art” events your commune has hosted, including the one with the corn cobs. 

You get up to the booth and sit down, taking deep, calming yoga breaths. Your hands are shaking as you open your binder at the board, and you close your eyes, trying to center yourself, but George’s decrepit old man balls float past the blackness, taunting you.

Fuck, you are going to miss _ so _many cues tonight. 

***

**Author's Note:**

> i can’t believe how little fic of these two there is… if you want something done i guess you just have to do it yourself honestly!!!!!!!
> 
> shoutout to 4 years of high school stage crew for providing me with the requisite technical theater knowledge to write this. who knew this is what all those hours of drilling 2x4s together was leading to!


End file.
